Modernise him, my dear, and I will believe in woman’s power.”
Mrs Chadwick glanced towards John Musgrave, seated erect in his chair, conversing seriously with the vicar’s bored little wife; then her eyes wandered back to Belle’s face and rested there affectionately.
“You have set me something of a task,” she said. “But I am going to attempt it.”
Walter Errol laughed softly.
“Since I possess already unshakable faith in your sex,” he said, “I predict enormous changes. ‘Ce n’est pas une simple émeute, c’est un révolution.’”
Chapter Five
Mrs Chadwick’s purpose in coming to Moresby was not concerned only, or even chiefly, with the interior decoration of the Hall, which was kept, as far as the squire’s means permitted, in very good order both inside and out. There was a certain amount of work to be done, and Mrs Chadwick purposed having a voice in this, as in other things; but her presence was more concerned with the home farm than with the palatial residence she intended to occupy. The home farm came within the range of her scheme for the development of women’s energies.
For several generations this farm had been worked on conservative lines by tenants who from father to son had succeeded to the place in unbroken succession, after the manner, indeed, of the family at the Hall. Though merely tenants, they had looked upon the farm as their rightful inheritance, quite as if it had been entailed property of their own. That anyone should seek to dispossess them would never have occurred to them in the light of possibility. But the present fanner was a bad tenant, and the farm was going to ruin. With the expiration of his lease had come the order for his eviction.
Mrs Chadwick, in taking the Hall, had stipulated for the right to find her own tenant for the farm. In the end she became the tenant, with full power to do what she liked with the property, providing always that what she did was for the improvement of the farm, and was first of all submitted to the squire for his approval. She had submitted so many schemes to him already that the worthy man, like John Musgrave, had felt his breath taken away; and in order to avoid any further shocks he had applied her to his lawyer, and gone abroad for an indefinite time to escape the worry of these matters. Change was not agreeable to him; but he was not so unwise as to object to the improvement of his estate, and the expenditure of other people’s money upon it.
The lawyer, grasping the main point that Mrs Chadwick intended laying out money on the property, and had plenty of it to disburse, was satisfied to give her a free hand. Provided only that she increased the working value of the farm, he saw no reason against her pulling down all the old buildings and erecting new ones on improved models, and enlarging and improving the dwelling-house. Everything was to be brought up to date. There could be no objection, the lawyer considered, to that. He was not averse to change when it had a sound financial basis; and Mrs Chadwick’s ideas occurred to him as practical. He was not quite so positive that her intention to work the farm principally with female labour would prove satisfactory. But that was her affair. If she liked to run risks of that nature she could afford the whim.
With the passing of the days, with the coming and going of architects and builders, and other persons the nature of whose occupation remained a mystery to John Musgrave, Mrs Chadwick’s host became more and more bewildered, more distinctly opposed to this feverish feminine energy – to this unfeminine encroachment on what he had always considered was the business of his sex. What, he wondered, was Mr Chadwick thinking about to allow his wife to interview these people, and settle without reference to his wishes all the details of the home which was, after all, to be paid for by cheques which he, presumably, would sign?
John Musgrave could not have brought himself to remind any woman of her duty as a wife; but he did in many ways allow Mrs Chadwick to see that he viewed her proceedings with amazement, and with a sort of well-controlled disapproval. His attitude only amused her. In the process of attempting to modernise Mr Musgrave, she took a pleasure occasionally in shocking him.
“Does Mr Chadwick usually leave the conduct of his affairs entirely in your hands?” he asked her once.
“His affairs!” she repeated, with an uplift of her arched brows. “Oh, you mean ‘our’ affairs. Will knows these things interest me; they only bore him. He is a lazy man, except in the matter of organisation; he’s splendid at that. Generally, I suggest a certain scheme and he develops it. He has a genius for developing.”
That certainly was true of Mr Chadwick. In most of his successful undertakings his wife had originated the idea, and he had developed it; hers was the quick, and his the thorough, brain. Quite voluntarily he ceded her a full share for the credit of the enormous fortune he had amassed; and he was lazily interested in her talent for spending it, and quite sincerely in sympathy with many of her schemes for the improvement of the conditions of her sex, with which was closely associated the improved conditions of the race.
It is a surprising, and would be a gratifying, fact, were it not for a feeling that it ought to be the other way about, that men are usually more ready to help a woman in her fight for the good of her sex than persons of the sex she is working for. Men shake off prejudices more readily than women, because their training and mode of life gives them a broader outlook. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. The narrow-minded man is, if more rare, considerably more contracted in his outlook than even the narrow-minded woman.
John Musgrave’s view was certainly contracted; but Mrs Chadwick, in her sanguine moments, entertained the belief that the restricted line of his horizon was due to the accident of circumstances, rather than to a natural deficiency in breadth, and held hopes of a possible development of his view. She did not tell him this; but she confided her belief to Mrs Sommers, who was as sceptical of John’s development as she was of the profitable results of Mrs Chadwick’s enterprises.
Mrs Chadwick told John Musgrave something else, which she deemed of greater importance even than the development of his mind, something which so scandalised Mr Musgrave as to render him speechless, amazed at her audacity, her want of delicacy; and too utterly dumbfounded to defend himself. She informed him, quite seriously, and without any effort to conceal her meaning, that he was not doing his duty by the State.
She had been in Moresby a week when she made this astounding attack, and the occasion which she chose for making it was one morning when she was returning with her host from an inspection of the village school, which, in a moment of weakness, he had suggested might interest her.
The school did interest her; but the sight of John Musgrave surrounded in the infants’ classroom with a number of greedy, unabashed babies, who felt in his pockets for sweets with a confidence that suggested familiarity with the practice, interested her far more. On the homeward walk she informed him that patronising other people’s babies, while undoubtedly commendable, was not his business in life; that he was not a good citizen, because, from purely selfish motives, he was neglecting his most important duty to the State.
John Musgrave was so embarrassed, and so annoyed, that during the rest of the walk, which fortunately was not of long duration, he could not utter a word. He turned in at his own gate in a seriously displeased frame of mind; and Mrs Chadwick, feeling guilty but unrepentant, preceded him up the path with the wickedest of little smiles playing about her lips.
“Thank you so much, Mr Musgrave,” she said, as they parted in the hall, “for a really enjoyable morning.”
Then she went upstairs to her room, and later she recounted for Belle’s edification the result of her visit to the school.
Mrs Sommers was amused; but she experienced a slight compassion for her brother, who would feel, she realised, as startled at a woman approaching a man on such a subject as he would be averse to the subject itself. People in
